Rants from a game developer, a guy, a prophet, and well a general person, i may be boring but i find fun stuff from time to time

Today I will be showing the masses about three point lighting. I made this display pedestal or platform whichever you wish to call it.

This is set up with the basic 3ds max default lighting currently we are going to fix this. First thing that comes to mind with three point lighting is there's 3 lights duh! The next picture will show where i put the lights in the scene, keep in mind the key light is usually coming from above via the sun or ceiling fixture.

Moving Right along, so here are the settings for the KEY light. The hot spot or beam parameters may be changed depending on the scale of your scene in the 3d application. The key light is the most important light and when you add the key light if you turn it off and try to render you will get black screen because there is no lighting, the one light you turned off! AKA when you add a light in 3ds max, the default lighting is removed until you remove all lights.

This is what my image looks like after rendering with the key light!

next we will add the fill light, this is the light that produces rays that bounce from different angles in front of our object. here are the settings for our fill light reference the diagram above for placement, if I had a human model on this i would want my fill light at about eye level with the model.

I did not do a render of just the fill light, sorry if i ruined your hopes and dreams during the tutorial.

Here are the settings for my backlight!

The backlight only, if you turn the fill and key lights off should look something like this:

Now in the end with all 3 lights in place positioned properly, and set up to our specifications will look something like below! This model I created is not using specular mapping, just normal and diffuse in case you were wondering by now.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I have and hope to see you come back again, until then I'm on the quest for followers and to get out of Minnesota! Farewell Fellow Readers!